Put a Kork in It
Downtown’s First Wine Cave

This city has a way of surprising you.

Not only can you wear white pants after Labor Day (they look great on you, by the way). But then, in a city with no basements, suddenly an underground wine cellar/medieval lair appears...

Welcome to Kork Wine & Cheese, possibly the city’s first (and only) bomb shelter turned wine bar, opening today in Downtown.

This place looks like a feudal dungeon of cabernet and brie: saloon-type bar, ornately carved wooden walls, racks lined with European and South American quaffs and a glass cheese case presided over by an Italian cheesemonger.

Your play: head to the staircase in the back. Go down the stairs. Walk into the shell of a 1940s bomb shelter, made to look like a Norse king’s grog den. But instead of casks of mead, there’s a long wooden communal tasting table, thousands of bottles of wine and leather couches. Bring a vino lover here on the weekends, when live jazz bands perform, and get comfortable with a full-bodied red from Mendoza, Argentina, and some platters of serrano ham and exotic cheese.

Nothing gets you comfortable like ham.